Another twitter tool to help with your nonprofit fundraising services

I wanted to continue an occasional series about how best to enhance your nonprofit fundraising services via different social media tools that I’ve used here at Miratel Solutions and have found worthwhile. I’ll continue my focus on using twitter more effectively and efficiently, like so many others the original idea of twitter was just to communicate with people you knew or about topics you found interesting. However with the right research and using some of the thousands of twitter applications that already exist you can use twitter to aid your nonprofit organisation to raise awareness and better still target appropriate audiences and interact with them.

The use of what are known on twitter as hashtags or pound signs ‘#’ is a useful way to help your tweets get found which ultimately should be your goal. That being said it’s not always easy to know which labels are being used, looked for and read by others. Think of the # as a label for your post specifically alerting twitter users to the content of your tweets and the links you may provide, as you probably already know tweets can link to websites, blogs, videos, PDFs or photographs. How you use hash tags can help determine the likelihood of your communication being found by others.

Understanding the reach of twitter content is really valuable and I wanted to recommend a tool that compiles real-time data which will better help you to categorize the content that you write. It’s a very simple tool and completely free, there are pricing plans that allow you to compile more data if needed but for initial research I found that the free version still provides plenty of information. Tweetreach is the tool and requires no downloads and the online guide will answer many of the questions about the data being provided. The basic version analyzes the last 50 tweets which contain the hash tag, phrase of words, URL or even twitter username that you decide to research. If you type in something like “Obama” you can see that (at the time I wrote this) more than 50 tweets had been posted within the last two minutes – which signifies something with great search volume but anything that you tweet is likely to get lost in the shuffle of incredibly high traffic. On the other hand if you search something that has only been tweeted nine times in the last six months your tweets won’t hold much value nor interest, so the key is finding good activity and interest but also of course being pertinent to what you’re writing about. I would suggest a topic that is tweeted about at least 4 plus times per day on average will provide value so long as it’s topical to your content.

You can use the tool to consider or even eliminate different hash tags or phrases which will help you pinpoint your use of twitter to best communicate with potential audiences. The on-screen reports provide lots of quick and easy to understand information but I thought I’d provide a quick example to get you going. Let’s say hypothetically your nonprofit looks to assist homeless individuals in Calgary. A word such as homeless will provide too many results and not be specific enough to really help your tweets, but by adding a location and/or more information it will help your content to be found. Best of all it may well be found by people who are actually looking for it. So let’s try the example of ‘homeless Calgary’ in the search.

At the time of writing tweetreach did find 50 matching results the most recent was two hours ago, whilst the oldest was five days ago so an average of about 10 per day. In total almost 40,000 users would have seen a tweet with this topic contained within. This example if relevant to your nonprofit’s communications would be of some use, but there’s far more information provided if you need it. The results will show a series of graphs, plus each of those 50 recent tweets and the twitter account profiles that most write or read content specific to what you searched. Each of those is probably worth a look and by clicking you can review the twitter profile which should explain a little more about who they are, what they do and you can see how they use twitter. Chances are some of these users could be worth following or even contacting.

The data at the top of the page is explained online by clicking on ‘how to read this report’ in the top right-hand corner. But in short it will display the reach summary-which represents the total number of users reached by the 50 summarised tweets on that topic. It will show how the users engage with the topic, whether it was a regular tweet, a retweet (somebody decided to share your content which further exposes it to new readers) or a reply back to the original sender. The last graph is about overall exposure which is really interesting, it shows if the users rarely, occasionally or often be tweets about the topic you have searched. With all this data the best way to use it is to make some comparisons especially with the numbers I’ve outlined above, I recommend using different hash tags or phrase combinations to compare just how popular they are and then marry that to your twitter campaign effectively. The site itself provides far more information than I can in this short post but if you’re looking to improve the effectiveness of how you are using twitter I would highly recommend this tool to help you structure your tweets. An engaged audience for nonprofits should always be the goal and it’s worth remembering that the top four nations for active twitter account usage include Canada, the US and the UK. Please let me know if you find this useful.